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Robert J. Foster
University of Rochester

Corporations as Partners: Connected Capitalism and

The Coca-Cola Company
For-profit corporations increasingly promote themselves as potential partners with
government (state actors) and community (NGOs and civil society groups) in addressing social problems. These partnerships enact what the former CEO of The
Coca-Cola Company, Neville Isdell, calls connected capitalismcollaborations
in which businesses must do good in order to maximize shareholder value. How
should we understand the self-qualification of corporations as responsible partners
and thus the corporate rejection of Milton Friedmans famous claim that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits? I address the question by considering
how the partnerships currently advocated by The Coca-Cola Company enhance the
value of corporate-owned brands and deflect criticism of business operations. I argue that these partnerships perform what Garsten and Jacobsson call post-political
governance in which cooperation with business displaces regulation of business
by government. I argue furthermore that these partnerships represent what Nader
calls harmony ideology, in which the concern for polite consensus displaces any
interest in addressing social inequality. [corporations, corporate personhood, corporate
social responsibility (CSR), Milton Friedman, The Coca-Cola Company]

In July 2012, The Coca-Cola Company announced that it was teaming up with
will.i.am, a musician and performer with the hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas, to
launch a new lifestyle brand called EKOCYCLE. EKOCYCLE would, in turn, invite
the makers of well-known brand-name products such as Levis (jeans) and Beats by
Dr. Dre (headphones) to become partners by creating fashionable items that contain
recycled materials. For example, when EKOCYCLE partnered in April 2013 with
the National Basketball Association and adidas1 (sports apparel and equipment),
consumers were offered the opportunity to purchase a limited edition T-shirt made
from a blend of recycled plastic and organic cotton, decorated with the logos of all
three corporate partners.
According to The Coca-Cola Companys press release:2

The EKOCYCLE brand initiative was developed to educate consumers

about everyday recycling choices and empower their purchasing decisions as part of a social change movement. The initiative supports
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 37, Number 2, pps. 246258. ISSN
C 2014 by the American Anthropological Association.
1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. 
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12073.

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recycling by helping consumers recognize that items they consider waste

today may be part of a lifestyle product they can use tomorrow. With
a dedication to supporting a more sustainable environment, the EKOCYCLE brand initiative will identify products, such as assorted plastic
bottles and aluminum cans that can be repurposed into recycled content
for fashionable and valuable lifestyle products.
The initiative is one of several undertaken since 2005 by the company in an effort
both to promote greater sustainability (Foster 2014) and to refresh the Coca-Cola
brand (Elliott 2012). Bea Perez, vice president and chief sustainability officer at The
Coca-Cola Company, noted that renewed attention to recycling engages a younger
generation that cares about the environment: That [engagement] dovetails with a
core goal of Coca-Cola, [Perez] added, which is to recruit teens (Elliott 2012).
***
What are we to make of corporate partnerships like this one? Are business corporations today embracing more than just a profit-making purpose? In what sounds suspiciously like a charter myth, it is often said that modern corporations were invented
to overcome the economic constraints of legal partnerships. As artificial persons enjoying indefinitely long lives and the advantage of limited liability, corporations have
enabled capital accumulation and risky investment on a scale far beyond the reach of
an aggregate of individuals in which each partner is vulnerable to personal lawsuits.
And so, happily, the advance of industrial technology and economic efficiency could
resume its preordained course.
It is accordingly ironic that many for-profit business corporations todayincluding
large corporations with transnational operationsreadily represent themselves as
partners, or as potential partners, with NGOs, civil society organizations, and government agencies in addressing a wide array of social problems (Rajak 2011:11).
Such corporate self-qualification signals an apparent repudiation of the declaration
of shareholder primacy baldly stated in the title of Milton Friedmans famous 1970
essay, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits. Indeed, it
recalls benevolent images from the early 20th century in which big businesses like
AT&T and General Electric fashioned themselves as servants of the public good
images strategically created to give the modern corporation a soul (Marchand 1998).
What does the rush toward partnership in the early 21st century involve if not merely
cynical public relations? Why do corporations seem to be assuming the role of states
in promoting social welfare?
These questions invite consideration of how public performances of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have become a normal feature of doing business in the
post-Enron era. I restrict consideration here to a quick look at developments over
the last ten years at The Coca-Cola Company. In particular, I discuss the notion
of connected capitalism proposed and championed by Neville Isdell, the CEO of
the company from 2004 to 2008 (Bisoux 2010). For Isdell, connected capitalism

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describes a new model of social engagement (Isdell 2010:44)an alternative to

both Friedmans position on maximizing profits and conventional corporate philanthropy. In connected capitalism, businesses, nonprofits, and governments work
together as partners to satisfy their own particular interests, including the long-term
profitability of businesses. Profits and progress, Isdell claims, need not conflict: In
fact, one demands the other (Isdell 2011:222).
Isdells view of profit-making and social amelioration as compatible recalls the better
known notion of the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, put forward by C. K.
Prahalad (2010), according to which corporations can make money and improve
lives by treating the population of the world that lives on two dollars a day as an
untapped market for consumer goods. (For philanthrocapitalism, see Adams 2012.)
Bottom of the pyramid initiatives explicitly target poor consumers (of inexpensive
goods such as antibacterial soap and iodized salt), while partnering initiatives such as
EKOCYCLE clearly target more affluent consumers. Yet, Isdell would undoubtedly
agree with Prahalads assertion: There is a growing recognition that marrying the
local knowledge of the nongovernmental organization with [the] global reach of the
multinational firm can create unique and sustainable solutions (2010:5).
My ultimate aim is to demonstrate how the corporate partnerships that realize Isdells vision of connected capitalism enact a form of post-political governance,
a term that I take from Garsten and Jacobsson (2007). This kind of governance
presumes that conflicts among differing interestsconflicts usually associated with
the politicalcan be transcended. Instead of confrontation there will be consensus (Rajak 2011:14); adversaries become partners, and voluntary agreements replace
regulation by both the competitive market and the hierarchical state (Moon 2002). In
other words, as Julia Elyachar (2012) noted in her discussion of the bottom of the
pyramid, markets are to be managed in enlightened ways through a hybrid formation
of NGOs, local governments, private firms, and multinational corporations.
My more immediate aim, however, is to demonstrate how the precepts of corporate
personhood make it easy to talk about partnership and, in so doing, make it difficult to
speak about other ways of imagining corporate accountability and the corporate form
itself. I suggest furthermore that such an inability to speak indicates the operation
of what Laura Nader (2001) calls harmony ideology, a dogma that privileges
consensus over contestation to the point of trading justice for peace.

***
What is a partner? Consider the handshake. This iconic gesture, images of which
frequently ornament CSR literature, expresses both voluntarism and symmetry: the
goodwill of equal agents. In so doing, it communicates the defining qualities of
partnership. The conceit of legal personhood, of course, makes it easy to talk about
corporations as human partnersto animate them with the moral virtues of people
committed to others.

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But the discourse of partnership has a reciprocal effect, namely, reinforcing a particular definition of personhood (see Kirsch 2014). By this definition, the person is an
individual who precedes the relationship of partnership. That is, the individual is a
natural unit, given or axiomatic. The relationship, by contrast, is a contingent and artificial creationa presumption of Milton Friedmans (1970) assertion that society is
a collection of individuals and the various groups they voluntarily form (126). This
reciprocal effect thus draws attention away from the legal fact that a corporation is
not quite a natural person; even after Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
(Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. [2010]), the controversial
U.S. Supreme Court decision that extended the rights of corporations to engage in
political speech, corporations do not enjoy all of the rights of natural persons (see
Ciepley 2012, Pollman 2011). This effect, moreover, represents the relationship of
partnership as a positive accomplishment that speaks well of the individual persons
moral character (indeed, of the individuals specifically human nature, according to
Adam Smith [1976].) Partnership, then, befits an unselfish, other-oriented person.
Who is this person? He (rarely she) is the corporate executive with whom the company becomes identified both to the general public (Bose 2010) and in particular to
the companys own mid-level managers (see Rajak 2014). That is, the rhetoric of
partnership and social responsibility doubles as rhetoric of managerial leadership.
Friedman (1970) seemed to realize this condition in presuming that the doctrine of
social responsibility meant that corporate executives have a social responsibility
in their capacity as businessmen. (Indeed, his essay postulates corporate leaders who
act with almost total autonomy and without the counsel of others inside the corporation.) This presumption would also probably make sense to Isdell, who in 2006
became chairman of the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF), a UK-based
organization that since 1990 has focused on the themes of business leadership and
corporate responsibility, working directly with CEO and Board level executives to
drive change across their companies and networks.3
In his memoir Inside Coca-Cola: A CEOs Life Story of Building the Worlds Most
Popular Brand, Isdell (2011) claimed that corporate executives today have an opportunity to surpass the corporate leader of yesterday who worked closely with
governments and nonprofits on a local level (218). Through partnerships with organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and United Nations, corporate executives
today can effect true social change globally (218). Isdells emphasis on partnering,
now conducted at a global level, signals a move away from the CSR initiatives of
an earlier era of welfare capitalism. These initiativesan array of programs that
supplied employees with everything from housing and pension plans to mirrors in
womens dressing rooms (Marchand 1998)were centered within the corporation.
Connected capitalism, however, requires corporations to collaborate with external
organizations, especially NGOs.
Isdells claims also indicate a shift in emphasis from shareholder value to stakeholder
value, that is, from a view of the corporation as the property of its investor-owners to
a view of the corporation as a separate entitya person with the capacity to act in the
interest of not only investors but also employees, customers, and community members

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(Foster 2012). The effects of such a shift remain unclear. It is a perverse coincidence
that viewing corporations as autonomous person-like entities can underwrite both
CSR programs to make a corporation accountable to all its stakeholders and legal
arguments to endow a corporation with constitutional rights against government
regulation (Mark 1987). John Dewey, who highlighted the indeterminacy of theories
of the corporation, made this point long ago. Dewey (1926) noted that assimilating a
corporation to a singular person, even if deemed a limited creature of the state, might
end up enlarging the corporations rights, privileges, and immunities:
In an individualistic periodthat is, an era chiefly concerned with
rights of private property and contractit is pretty sure to do so. Consider,
for example, the court decisions that a business corporation is a person
in the sense covered by the Fourteenth Amendment, and the effects of
this decision. [668]
In other words, the corporate-person metaphor can have unintended effects.
***
For Isdell, connected capitalism is emphatically neither charity nor penance, as if
companies owe society a debt for making a profit (2011:219). Connected capitalism
is activity tied to the core long-term business interests of a companysecuring
sources of clean water for The Coca-Cola Company, for example. Hence, it resolves
the old agency problem within the corporation, that is, the accountability of corporate
managers who act with other peoples money. Corporate profitability and community
sustainability can coexist without conflict. Milton Friedman (1970) would not of
course disagree, but he would be inclined to call the arrangement hypocritical
window dressing, the generation of goodwill as a by-product of expenditures that
are entirely justified (124) in terms of corporate self interest.
There is, however, more going on here than mere hypocrisy. The partnering initiatives championed by Isdell and undertaken by The Coca-Cola Company illustrate
a corporate approach to social activism consistent with the ideal of postpolitical
governancean approach adopted by corporations in the wake of street protests
against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington, in 1999. Richard Edelman, of Edelman PR Worldwide, foreshadowed the game plan in his 2001 report of
a survey of opinion leader attitudes toward NGOs. This survey, commissioned
in response to the first anniversary of the Seattle meeting, found that NGOs were
trusted nearly twice as much to do what is right as compared with corporations
(Edelman 2001:34). Edelmans advice followed accordingly:
If Seattle was a wake up call, then the surveys findings can be considered
a smoke alarm, requiring decisive action. It is our recommendation that
a company proactively manage relationships with NGOs to protect its
global corporate reputation. No longer can corporations risk meeting

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Figure 1: Brandization: The Global Fund subsumed under the familiar script and
iconic red color of Coca-Cola. Source: http://www.untogo.org/News/Health/Coca
-Cola-and-the-Global-Fund-announce-partnership-to-help-bring-critical-medicinesto-remote-regions
minimal standards. Instead, corporate leaders must learn more about
NGO concerns and begin dialogues with them to implement programs,
strategies, and tactics designed to avert confrontational situations before
they become major news stories. [36]
Reputation is crucial to brand management, which stimulates the production of social
relations in the form of brand communities, for example, and offers consumers material and symbolic media for self-fashioning. This consumption work then becomes
a source of surplus value for corporations as consumers pay rent to gain access to
the products and means of their own self-fashioning (Foster 2008a, 2008b). From
this perspective, partnerships brandize NGOs (Willmott 2010); that is, partnerships
treat NGOs as brands (as assets built partly out of consumption work) and then subsume these brands under the corporate brand, consequently increasing the monetary
value of the corporate brand and generating revenue for shareholders. This process
of subsumption or brandization (Willmott 2010) is effectively illustrated by the
image that accompanied one announcement of a partnership between The Coca-Cola
Company and the Global Fund to deliver critical medicines to remote parts of the
world (see Figure 1). NGOsto which Edelman (2001) referred as the new super
brandsdo not merely legitimize corporations; they function as a source of surplus
value for corporations.
Partnerships offer corporations political benefits as well. For Isdell (2011:241), connected capitalism is opposed to reckless capitalism or capitalism that has become
detached from society. Reckless or detached capitalism of the sort that produced the
BP oil spill and the financial crisis of 2008 will provoke a populist responsenew
forms of protectionism or maybe even socialism. Isdell noted that people like former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called for the nationalization of BPs holdings.
These alternatives to capitalism, Isdell insisted, since they previously failed, must

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be avoided. The answer is connected capitalism: We have to rewire our companies

and redesign the way that capitalism works by connecting it to communities and the
values of its employees, building new alliances with civil society and governments to
address the challenges we face (Melford and Isdell 2012). Put differently, connected
capitalism heralds the return of a managerial capitalism in which the corporation is
understood as a social institution, an organization with constituents and responsibilities well beyond the individuals and institutions that own stock (Ho 2009:124).
Isdell thus presumes to voice Main Streets outrage over the out-of-control institutional culture of Wall Street and the harsh discipline applied by Wall Street investment
banks on corporations in the name of increasing share prices.

***
The Coca-Cola Company and its affiliates have entered into numerous partnerships
with an array of organizations. Not all of these partnerships obviously reflect the principles of Isdells connected capitalism, but one that manifestly does is the highly visible partnership between the company and the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF),4
an organization with high levels of public trust according to the Edelman report on
NGOs as superbrands. This partnership, launched in 2007, focuses on water conservation and climate protection. In addition to $20 million dollars, the WWF receives
the companys assistance in implementing conservation projects in seven selected
river basins around the world. The Coca-Cola Company in turn receives WWF assistance in minimizing water and energy use throughout its supply chain. That is,
the WWF supplies The Coca-Cola Company with expertise of the sort that Friedman
complained most corporations lack when it comes to engaging in projects of CSR,
thereby preempting any criticism that CSR tempts managers to make uninformed
decisions about allocating scarce resources.
The partnership between The Coca-Cola Company and the World Wildlife Fund resists criticism. Who would argue against clean water? Until, of course, one asks in
the first place why clean water should be transformed into a sugar-laden, high caloric,
nonnutritious beverage marketed globally to teenagers, often in circumstances where
peoples access to clean water for drinking, bathing, and cooking is highly insecure. Indeed, The Coca-Cola Company has faced allegations that its bottlers in
India have mined or depleted groundwater and polluted soil with toxic byproducts given to farmers for use as fertilizer. These allegationsas well as charges of
complicity in labor violence in Colombiahave mobilized not only local but also
international protests against the companyprecisely the sort of confrontational
situations against which Edelman had warned. (For details on the controversies
surrounding the companys business practices, see Foster 2008a.)
In other words, the rhetoric of the partnership with WWF is that of harm reduction:
The Coca-Cola Company pledges to use less clean water to make more cans of soda
or . . . bottles of clean water! The partnership thus functions much like what Benson
and Kirsch (2010a) have called corporate oxymorons, comforting figures of speech
such as safe cigarettes and sustainable mining in which the first term obscures

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the harmful implications of the second (see also Benson and Kirsch 2010b; Benson
2014).
CorporateNGO partnerships can indeed bring together incongruous elements, notably in the form of so-called green consumerism or eco-chic (Barendregt and Jaffe
2014). Green consumerism of the kind represented by the EKOCYCLE initiative
promises to make stylish sensibility compatible with concern for the environment.
For example, in 2007 Conservation International and Fiji Water announced a partnership aimed at making the designer bottled water company carbon negative. What
does it take to make such a counterintuitive alliance seem plausible? I suggest that an
answer can be found in the response of Glenn Prickett, a Conservation International
senior vice president, when asked if green groups should endorse bottled water: That
nation is going to find something to ship out of Fiji. It could be logs or an industrial
product. Wed much rather see it be a clean product that is produced with renewable
energy. Prickett similarly claimed: Maybe it would be morally preferable to carry a
bottle I filled at the tap, but bottled water is a consumer reality. So rather than operate
in a moralistic framework, well use the economy as it exists to make a difference
(Deutsch 2007, C3).
There is an assumption of inevitability in these comments, and a resigned assertion
that clean bottled water is at least better than some dirty industrial product. The
result is discursive paralysisan inability to formulate and articulate an alternative version of things that recalls the condition of capitalist realism that Michael
Schudson insightfully associated with advertising. Schudson (1984) observed that
advertising, like official art, brings some images and expressions quickly to mind
and makes others relatively unavailable (230). Partnerships likewise promote a particular view of the world, one in which public or collective values are invoked, but to
be pursued only through incremental voluntary changes in either business practices
or individual consumption practices. It is a world in which the winwin solutions
epitomized by corporateNGO partnerships do the social work formerly done by
regulatory states acting in the name of citizens. Indeed, states and citizens inhabit this
world uncomfortably. For all the happy talk about alliances that include governments
as equal partners, the role of government in connected capitalism seems uncertain, if
not subordinate. In his memoir, Isdell (2011) thus accuses governments of lagging
behind corporations and nonprofits in forging partnerships (237). His only positive
examples of government partnering initiatives are legal reforms that make it easier to
conduct business. Elsewhere Isdell makes it plain that it is NGOs and business that
must act together to prevent populist protectionism: Where they lead, governments
must follow (Melford and Isdell 2012). And given the disparity in resources that
NGOs and business command, it is not difficult to imagine who will navigate.

***
The conceit of corporate personhood in which legal entities assume human characteristics makes it seem plausible that a company can act as a considerate partner
and good citizen. Shevers (2010) discussion of Shells CSR programs and public

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relations in Argentina demonstrates how a company can exploit this plausibility to

reconfigure historical relations of paternalism and patronage, rendering itself as an
individual who cares about its fellow citizens but has limited obligations to them
(28). That is, the corporations fellow citizens must fix their own problems; corporate partnerships will empower these citizens to do so by themselves. Partnerships
oriented toward self-sufficiency thus replace traditional charity and philanthropy.
In effect, however, corporate partnerships often replicate older forms of patronage,
dependency, and asymmetrical reciprocity (Rajak 2011:19). Business partners, after
all, are ideally equal and independent, symmetrically responsible for sharing the same
kinds of input (expenses) and output (profit). Bryn Jones (2007:169) argues that corporate partnerships, by contrast, bear many of the features of patronclient relations.
A corporation, for example, selects among potential clients according to its own discretionary criteria, excluding NGOs and pressure groups considered unsympathetic
to the corporations activities (Benson 2014; Rajak 2011). This selection process
recalls Gershons description of hiring in the neoliberal marketplace in which businesses choose potential employees who signal that they are managing themselves
correctly, replete with expandable skills, useful alliances, and appropriate branding
strategies (Gershon 2014). As Jones (2007:170) further notes, less dominant parties
to these arrangements seek them because of their own relative weakness, including
financial need. The social legitimacy and status of responsible benefactors in turn
accrues to the more dominant party, namely, the corporation. A precapitalist form
of social relationship thus lurks under the guise of a contractual agreement between
equal and sovereign individuals: the paradigmatic social relationship of bourgeois
society.
For Isdell, partnerships between corporations and NGOs nevertheless represent
progress: the defeat of the shareholder value movement. He triumphantly observes:
Milton Friedmans dictum that there is only one social responsibility of business
which is to make profits was made history and far greater recognition was given to
the connections between business and improving society (Melford and Isdell 2012).
We should once more appreciate the irony. For Friedman, CSR personifies the corporation as a moral actor in an immoral or amoral market. This way of characterizing
the market, he reasoned, made business more vulnerable to arguments in favor of
increased government control. The proper way to prevent populist protectionism for
Friedman was to eschew all forms of external control over the market, including
CSR.
There is perhaps something to be said for Friedmans position, which coincidentally
is not that different from Robert Reichs (2008) views of CSR. Friedman rejects
partnerships and other CSR initiatives because he understands the relationship between society and the market as not necessarily winwin. Moreover, he recognizes
that CSR is not democratic; it works outside established governmental provisions for
taxing and administering expenditure programs. And even for Friedman, a modicum
of such provision is unavoidably necessarygrudging acceptance on his part that in

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some cases the individual must conform to the social interest as determined by the
majority.
Connected capitalism promises to resolve the antagonism between state and market,
and between social accountability and business-as-usual. In so doing, however, it displaces politics as a confrontation between different and irreconcilable interests. Isdell,
in advocating connected capitalism, thus extends the reach of a harmony ideology
that treats any objections to the winwin solution (offered by green consumerism,
for example) as uncivil, if not downright hostile. Hence his characterization of The
Coca-Cola Companys critics as a small minority of activists [who] will always
prefer confrontation, with its attendant publicity, to the search for mutually beneficial
common ground (Isdell 2007).
What we might well need, then, are fewer allies and partners for corporations and
more critics and adversaries. Why? Laura Nader (2001) has forcefully reminded us
of all the good that has come from outrage and indignation, and of what happens to
democracy when people dont speak out (B13). Just as the conceit of personhood
makes it easy to talk about corporations as responsible partners and fellow citizens,
the force of harmony ideology makes it difficult to engage in open protest and
noisy dissent. An overriding concern for consensus comes to eclipse any interest
in addressing social inequality; large multinational firms can thus make enormous
profits while consumers of canned soda and even imported bottled water need not
fuss about the labor or environmental costs. It is as if an intolerance of conflict
seeped into the culture to prevent not the causes of discord but the expression of it
(Nader 2002:43). The first step toward resisting the seduction of ideas like connected
capitalism, therefore, is to recognize them for what they are: instruments of control
and power the effects of which are hardly benign.

Notes
I thank Stuart Kirsch and Pete Benson for inviting me to participate in the conference
session for which this paper was originally written. I also thank two anonymous
PoLAR reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
1. Coca-Cola, EKOCYCLE, Levis, Dr. Dre, and adidas are registered trademarks.
2. Coca-Cola Press Center, http://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/pressreleases/an-end-is-a-cool-new-start-william-and-the-coca-cola-companyrecharge-recycling-with-launch-of-lifestyle-brand-ekocycle (accessed February
16, 2013).
3. International Business Leaders Forum, http://www.iblf.org/ (accessed February
16, 2013).
4. Renewing Our Partnership. Expanding Our Impact, at http://www.thecocacolacompany.com/citizenship/conservation_partnership.html (accessed June 12,
2014).

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Cases Cited
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. [2010]